The Natural Philosophy of Love

by Remy de Gourmont

Camels, dromedaries and cats have the end of the penis bent backward (this explains the tom-cat's manner of urination), the tip does not straighten itself or point forward save in erection. Not only the prong but the sheath of rodents points backward and ends near the anus, and in front of it. The penis is slender in ruminants, and in wild boar; thick and round in solipedes, elephant, lamentin (sea-cow, manatee); thick and conic in the dolphin, cylindrical in rodents and primates. The gland, which takes all intermediary forms between ball and point, has in the rhinoceros the shape of a gross fleur-de-lys. In the cats small spikes rise and point toward the base, and in agouti and gerboa there are holding flanges which grip the organs of the female.

The prong of many mammifers, a real member, is held up by an interior bone, formed at the cost of the conjunctive partition which separates the two hollow chambers. This penial bone is found in many quadrumanes, chimpanzees, orang-outangs, most carnivora, dogs, wolves, felines, martin, otter, badger, among rodents, beaver, seal, and cetaceous animals; it is lacking in ruminants, pachyderms, insectivora, toothless animals. In man one sometimes finds a trace of it in the form of a slender prismatic cartilage. In the enormous penis of the whale it resembles a bell-clapper. The penial bone diminishes the erectile capacity of the prong in stopping the development of the hollow chambers, but it assures the rigidity of the member, obtained in the other penial type by the inflow of blood which causes the swelling. Man ought to have the penial bone; he has lost it in the course of ages, and this is doubtless fortunate, for a permanent rigidity, or one too easily obtained would have increased, to madness, the salacity of his species. It is perhaps for this reason that great apes are rare, although they are strong and agile. This view would be confirmed if the penial cartilage were found regularly in very lustful men or with a certain frequency among human races most addicted to eroticism.

The penis is found in woman in the form of clitoris. This is almost as voluminous as a true penis in quadrumanes; it is atrophied in other species. It varies individually in women, certain of them being in this respect quadrumanes. Sometimes the clitoris is pierced for the passage of the urethra (certain apes and the mole); a slight trace of this meatus is seen at the head of the woman's clitoris. In species whose males possess a penial bone the female has often a clitoridian bone; nothing more clearly affirms the parallelism of these two organs, whereof one serves only for pleasure, after having been, perhaps in a long distant era, when man romped among marine invertebrates, a real instrument of fecundation. The greater labia, limiting the general orifice of the vulva, exist only in woman and, less markedly, in the female orang-outang. Circular in rodents, transversal in the unique case of the hyena, a heteroclite animal, the vulva is longitudinal in all other mammifers. Completely imperforate in the mole the vagina is more or less closed by a membrane, which the male penis tears in first encounter, in women, and several quadrumanes, certain small monkeys, the marmoset, certain carnivora, the bear, hyena, white-bellied seal, the daman (nailed); it is replaced in dog, cat, ruminants by an annular gripping between the vagina and the vestibule. The maidenhead is, therefore, not peculiar to human virgins, and there is no glory in a privilege which one shares with the marmoset.

Menstruation is found in quadrumanes, in bats; other female mammals show an emission of blood, which is, however, limited to the rutting season. The position of teats is variable, as also their number, they are in the groin in ruminants, solipedes, cetaces; ventral in dogs, pigs; pectoral and always two in nearly all primates, chiroptera, elephants, and sirenians, who for this reason, doubtless, reminded the sailors of the ancient world of their women.

Other particularities and correspondences are examined in the next chapter which deals with the mechanism of love, and the method used by divers animals to make use of their organs according to the commandment of nature. There remain for consideration the lesser mammals and other vertebrates whose fecundatory instruments resemble those of mammifera.

In man and other placentaires, the forked prong is a teratological fact only encountered in incomplete double monsters. It is, on the contrary, the most general form among marsupials. A double vagina corresponds to this penis, double at least from the gland, thus in kangaroo and opossum. This original biparity is found regularly in the uterus of certain placentaires, hares, rats, bats, carnivora. The uterus of marsupials is simple without narrowing of the throat. One knows that their young stay there but a short time, that they are born not as foetus but as germs, and complete their development in the marsupial pouch. An opossum, destined to attain about the size of a cat, is at birth about bean-size. These animals, therefore, differ profoundly from other mammifera.

Some reptiles, like crocodiles and most chelonians, have only a simple prong; some tortoises have a forked tip to the penis, it is many-branched in the trionix, carnivorous tortoise rightly called ferocious. The saurians and ophidians can deploy outside the cloaca two erectile prongs; in saurians, lizards, they are short, round and bristle with prickles. The females have no clitoris save when the male has a single prong; at least the clitoris is only well constituted in crocodilians and chelonians.

Copulation is unknown to batrachians, whose contact is nevertheless very dose; it is unknown to most fish, whose amours are without even contact. Certain selacians however (dogfish, skates), and perhaps also one or two teleostians (bony fish), and the lamprey, have a copulating organ which really enters the organ of the female.

The birds which have a penis or an erectile and retractile tubercle which serves, are the ostrich, the cassowary, the duck, the swan, the goose, the bustard, the mandou and certain neighbouring species; their hens have a ditoridian organ. The ostrich has a true prong, five or six inches in length, cut by a groove which serves as conduit for the seminal liquor; it is enormous in erection and tongue-shaped. The ostrich hen has a clitoris and coition occurs exactly as among mammals. The swan and duck are also very well provided with an erectile tubercle suited for copulation, and this explains at once the story of Leda, the libidinous reputation of the duck, and his exploits in the barn-yards, veritable abbeys of Thélème.

One can not here describe the copulative organs of arthropodes, comprising insects properly so-called. Enough to note that, however varied their forms, they behave very much as those of superior mammifers and are composed of two essential parts, the penis, sheathed in a penial scabbard, and the vagina, prolonged by the copulative pouch which receives the penis. Fish and birds, lacking external apparatus are reduced to methods which will be later examined. Hermaphrodite mollusks, with a marvellously complicated sexual apparatus, ought also to be studied separately. Finally, the amorous habits of insects form a series of illustrative chapters.